Sharp Innovations Blog
Is Your Facebook Page Transparent and Accountable?
March 7, 2019Facebook has become a central location for most business’s advertising and marketing efforts. It’s easy to use, simple to track visibility and progress, and most people spend at least an hour a day mindlessly scrolling through their news feed.
Recently, Facebook has been tightening their security in regards to what you can safely post. As a business, this is good news – you’ll see less spam in your inbox and extra-rude comments on posts will be flagged more quickly. However, to keep your business safe and clean in the eyes of Facebook’s crawlers, remember to follow these guidelines. Happy posting!
Website Brand Consistency 101: The Essential Guide
February 19, 2019Vital to any company’s marketing efforts is a consistent, recognizable brand. Coca-Cola is identifiable through their font and red and white color scheme. The “golden arch” connects everyone’s mind to McDonald’s. Amazon’s orange, curved arrow underline is recognizable without even seeing the website name. All of these are excellent examples of consistent brands, and they all incorporate aspects of their logo throughout their websites. You should, too!
How Much Content is Too Much? Your Website Content Guide
February 1, 2019Any good designer understands that web sites, particularly home pages, require a balance of images to text. Too many images with not enough content will make the site appear juvenile and might be confusing to new visitors. Too much content can cause the reader to become unfocused and abandon their efforts to peruse the site.
It’s important to understand the factors that go into designing a web site as well as specifically tailoring each site design to the business at hand. Today, we want to dig into what really goes into designing a web site homepage, and how to determine how much content is too much content.
2018 in Review
January 30, 20192018 was a big year for the Sharp Innovations team! We look back at some of the highlights of the last year and thank you all for being a part of our exciting trajectory toward the future.
Perhaps the most exciting news of 2018 for us was finally obtaining a certification we’ve been working toward for quite some time. Rewarded for an effort that stretched over three years, we completed the process to become GSA certified. This allows us to work with all government agencies, whether at the state or federal level, for all their web development and digital marketing needs. We’re one of the select few firms in PA who can do so, and we look forward to this new set of challenges.
4 Ways Fonts Can Make or Break Your Website
August 21, 2018There are a wide variety of factors to consider when designing a new website; imagery, color scheme, call-to-action button style, and overall layout are all essential to your website’s success and lead generation. These are all heavily scrutinized by designers and clients alike. A vital decision that is often overlooked, however, involves font choice.
Fonts can truly tie a website together and even influence a user’s behavior, making them a crucial part of the design process. Certain fonts should make key phrases jump out by being bold or unique, while others need to be comfortable to read in paragraphs. Typographical hierarchy is essential as well, leading the user along a designated path through the page’s content and drawing attention to specific pieces without distracting from the main text of the page. The science behind effective typography goes deep, but here we’ll focus on just 4 ways that font choice alone can affect the performance of your website.
5 Ways to Boost Your Social Media Presence *Almost* Overnight
June 22, 2018In this day and age, social media is the top dog. Everybody who’s anybody is sharing, occasionally on the verge of “over-sharing”, everything happening in their lives. How do you keep up and, more importantly, stand out in the ever-growing flood of constant communication? Here are five ways to show off your business in the digital world today.
SEO – Always Changing And Always Necessary For A Successful Website
June 13, 2018When you have a website, and potential customers are searching for a business that offers the products and services that you do, a well designed SEO program will help to bring those potential clients to your site. You can think of SEO as a match game for you and prospective customers, and without a good SEO program, many potentially profitable matches may not happen for you.
By definition, SEO is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results, which are results that occur naturally, not as a result of an advertisement that you’ve bought.
To keep your site working effectively, it’s absolutely necessary to refresh your SEO strategy on a regular basis to match the methods people are using to find you, because those methods aren’t the same as they were 5 or 10 years ago.
Flash – What Flash?
May 21, 2018If you’ve been using the Internet for more than 10 years, you can remember those cool little movie clips or interactive portions of websites that used Flash. Well, since that time, the Internet has come a long way, and due to modern programming languages, Flash is no longer necessary. Not only is it no longer necessary, it is being killed off by all modern browsers with Google leading the way with their Chrome Browser.
Adobe (the company that owns Flash) – has announced that even they are going to stop supporting it in 2020. What does this mean for you as a person or a business who has a website? Well, as time goes on between now and then, you will see that Flash elements on a website are not working anymore. Does this mean no more fancy movie clips and no more interaction between clients and your website? No, it’s actually quite the contrary.
Security Basics
March 26, 2018We all hear about cyber-security attacks in the news with major companies getting hacked, data breaches, etc. Attackers will continue to attack the major companies in various ways that are out of our control, but there are several security practices that we can do to prevent attackers from getting to our personal information for their personal gain. A few things we can do are to protect ourselves from phishing attacks (scammers using false identity to get personal information or money), protect sensitive information, and to secure our passwords.
Phishing
You get a call from someone claiming they are from your electric company and state that you have not paid your bill for the last 3 months. If you do not pay over the phone RIGHT NOW, THIS MINUTE with your credit card, your electric will be shut off immediately. You know you have paid your bill in a timely manner, but the caller creates an uncertainty and you provide the card information as requested. Later you find out this was a call from a scammer.
4 Ways To Get The Design You Want
February 14, 2018When you’re getting ready to make a new website, you can take some important steps to ensure that you’re happy with the design that your developer creates for you. Here at Sharp, our designers will always try to incorporate your vision as we see it while still implementing general rules of good practice in the world of the web so that you get a website that matches your vision and works efficiently for your customers.
Things like button placement, color palette, fonts, iconography, photos, and so much more are all important decisions that go into an initial website design. Merging these deliberate decisions with what you have in mind is a careful balance that can sometimes result in something unexpected without a lot of detail. Some people like to be surprised and allow our designers as much creative freedom as they want, but if you have a particular vision of how you want your new site to look, here are 4 ways to get the design you want.
1. Provide as much detail as possible. If you have a very specific vision, be sure to communicate it as clearly as you can. The more detail you give us, the closer we can get to your vision. To you, that vision can seem obvious, but we may have a very different picture in mind if you don’t provide us with copious descriptions of what you’re looking for. So tell us every little thing. For a web designer, there is no such thing as too much detail!